Inaugural lectures include impact of stress on hearts

The new series of inaugural lectures continues on 1 July with two short lectures from Professor Gill Cockerill and Professor Abhiram Prasad.

All staff and students are warmly invited to attend the lectures, which will take place at 5.30pm in Lecture Theatre F. The lectures will be followed by a reception in H2.6 on the second floor of Hunter Wing.

The first lecture, by Professor Gill Cockerill, will be titled 'Translational Research - Mapping Pathways to Impact’.

Professor Gillian Cockerill is Head of the Vascular Research Centre in the Cardiovascular and Cell Sciences Research Institute at St George's.

In 2003 Professor Cockerill joined St George's as a senior lecturer and secured EU and British Heart Foundation funding to support her work into therapies for reducing the rate of growth of abdominal aortic aneurysms.

Having obtained a BSc (Hons) in Biochemistry from King's College, Professor Cockerill went on to gain a PhD at Melbourne University (1991) before taking up a postdoctoral Fellowship at the Hanson Centre for Cancer Research in Adelaide. During this time she was awarded two prestigious Young Investigator Awards.

On her return to the UK in 1996, Professor Cockerill was awarded a British Heart Foundation Intermediate Fellowship to investigate the anti-inflammatory properties of HDLs in a large animal model, in the laboratory of Professor Dorian Haskard at Imperial College.

Professor Abhiram Prasad will present the second lecture, ‘Stress Cardiomyopathy: A Tale of Hearts and Minds’.

Abhiram Prasad is Professor of Interventional Cardiology at St George's, University of London and Honorary Consultant Cardiologist at St George's University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. His research interests are in coronary artery disease and coronary intervention.